The Map of Time: A Novel by Félix J. Palma

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

disclaimer: I won this book from Good Reads First Reads contest

This review originally appeared on the Good Reads website

Unsurprising for a novel about time travel, the contents of the book are not strictly chronological. Do not despair, this is not done for the purposes of obfuscation, in fact, the book is almost exactly like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in narrative structure. The book is told in three parts. Each of these parts is, as in Pulp Fiction, a story that stands on its own with a beginning, climax, and an end. But they all overlap with each other causing or being affected by the actions of the other story. And, the story as a whole also has a bit of an arc, again, like Pulp Fiction.

Fedora 15, which is almost out, will have Gnome 3.0 as its default desktop and since it’s such a radical departure from the Gnome 2.x series, I thought I’d have a post that reminds us of how it used to be and what Gnome evolved to become. So here’s a two screen desktop:

[caption id=“attachment_4512” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Gnome 2.32 - entire desktop”] [/caption]

You probably need to click on the image so that it can be at a useful size.  Gnome 2.32 consisted of two panels, one at top and one at the bottom.  The one at the top housed menus that we’ll get to in a moment.  Next to that are launchers.  You could put launchers for all your most-used programs there.  Because of that, I almost never went to the menus to launch a program.  Over towards the right are panel applets.  I have some for mounting and for showing the load on my computer.  Then there’s the date/time where you can click on it and get a calendar.  This area also had icons for certain types of programs like instant messengers.  At the bottom you had the button to see the desktop, the list of open programs, the desktop switcher for the different virtual desktops, and the trash.   Also notice that the programs have minimize, maximize and close buttons.

note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography.  While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work.  Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs

I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time.  I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it.  I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up.  I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time.  I even bought a book about techniques.  It all floundered for five years.  Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com.  There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography.  I joined them.  They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC.  So I joined that group.  And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available.  At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.

In this Photojojo photo time capsule, some 365 and some photos from my Delaware trip.

And now to Mexico for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #126 is:

I didn’t take this photo. (I didn’t take a tripod on our honeymoon trip) We went to Puerto Aventuras, an hour south of Cancun, for our Honeymoon. This beach was right outside our hotel. It was, more or less, a perfect trip. I’ll blog more about it if other photos show up.

Another Otakon costume in this Top 200 Photo.

photo #127 is:

As I mentioned before, I enjoy the costumes people work on for Otakon. In this case, the person has chosen a video game character rather than an anime character. Dan informed me that she is Crimson Viper from Street Fighter IV. In the background you can see a group from another video game, Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

Monday night, as I walked to the Ram’s Head Live concert venue, I had no idea what to expect. Earlier in the year Daniel had retweeted some strange, witty tweets from some dude named Childish Gambino. Based on the name I thought it was some weird Italian joke tweet account. Then, a few months later, I joined tumblr after seeing Dan’s tumblr posts on his blog’s sidebar and determining there was some neat stuff going on there. That’s when I came across the site Hipster Childish Gambino and saw posts like these:

Cornell is once again the subject in this Top 200 Photo.

photo #128 is:

This is another photo from the top of the Clocktower. In this photo you see Ho Plaza, Willard Straight Hall, a chapel, Olin, Ganett, and Ithaca in College Town and beyond. (And a bunch of other buildings on the periphery)

And once again we return to Brooklyn for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #129 is:

Danielle’s family lives off of the last stop for the Q or B trains (as of this writing). So it’s a great place to photograph if you want to have an empty subway car. It can get really busy in the summertime with people headed to the beach, but usually it’s pretty empty at that stop.

Tai Shan is back for this Top 200 Photo

photo #130 is:

Another photo of Tai Shan. This time he’s small enough to get on these flimsy branches without falling immediately. It was fun to watch him test the branches to see if they would hold his weight.